Brand New Brand Values

This week the Six Cities Design Festival, Scotland's first nationwide celebration of style, will be launched in Edinburgh and ahead of the launch the organizers, Napier University have come up with a rogues gallery of offending corporate logos.One disgruntled member of the public hates the Starbucks logo, why? "Come in for 30 minutes and enjoy a very overpriced coffee and cake and be transported into the world of Friends and Frasier." Morrisons the Supermarket are another whose logo people apparently love to hate.

Paul Rodgers, of Glass Box, a design collective of staff from Napier University and a reader in design at Napier's School of Creative Industries, said: "We've already received a number of nominations for bad designs but we're looking for even more." Well my nomination would be...To me it speaks volumes about how unimaginative the university is in terms of its type face and the red triangle - no doubt someone will tell me it represents a highly developed ambition for learning in a red brick university whose ambition is to be the best educational establishment in the best small country in the world....or something similar. Of course I jest, but surely from the comments about Starbucks the awards are just as likely to reflect people's view of the brand rather than the actual logo. Indeed corporate rebranding is big business - remember the fiasco over British Airways a few years back?

If a company changes its logo and rebrands itself does the company itself change? If Scotland becomes independent will we be rebranded, take on new brand values and will we have a new identity?